Hills Like White Elephant Essay

In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephant”, Hemingway uses setting difficult to understand but adequate to stress on the tension, life and death doubt of the two characters, and their antagonistic conversation on whether the woman should have an abortion. The characters, a young girl called Jig and her American lover sits at a train station in Spain around a valley, have beer and try new drinks and dances around their situation on whether they should proceed to Barcelona to abort their unborn baby. Jig opposes the idea of the abortion but ironically, makes her point. The American whiffler suggests abortion as the solution to their problem convince Jig that is the right thing to do. Hemingway show significant emphasis on the story’s settings, the burden the characters relationship and the choices they have to make.
Moreover, Hemingway effectively draws attention of the landscape, and the opposite nature of the coastal scenery. The setting of the story symbolically implies the conflict between the characters and the painful choice they must make. On one side of the Ebro River, shows vitality of the vegetation, the peaceful flow of river, trees moving to and fro, to and fro, and grains dancing calmly to the wind with mountains high above
That is when the conversation occurred between thirty eight-forty minutes. Although we do not know how long the character’s had been waiting earlier. The train stopped for two minutes and headed to Madrid. For all we know, the lover’s have been patiently waiting on the train but they are not willing to wait on the unborn child to see the beauty of nature. The dialogue between the lover’s takes a long duration. The duet quarrel over their problem, the man mostly speaks in Spanish, while the bar tender translate what he said to